Blue chest "Set requests" and "Read contents" at same time

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SLB
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Blue chest "Set requests" and "Read contents" at same time

Post by SLB »

Need a switch between "red wire output green wire input" or "red wire input green wire output" for blue and green chest .

It can make "Set requests" and "Read contents" at same time

golfmiketango
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Re: Blue chest "Set requests" and "Read contents" at same time

Post by golfmiketango »

SLB wrote:Need a switch between "red wire output green wire input" or "red wire input green wire output" for blue and green chest .

It can make "Set requests" and "Read contents" at same time
[Edit: I just realized you are requesting for the red and green wires to do different things. That's really a quite interesting idea as it could be used to solve the problems I described in my post. There is no precedent for it in the game so far but that by no means makes it a bad idea. Indeed this same idea could "fix" the "muddle" I describe below as it pertains to inserters. When I wrote the following I somehow had read your post as saying only " to be able to set requests and read contents at the same time;" I'd missed the crucial novel idea of your post: 'Need a switch between "red wire output green wire input" or "red wire input green wire output'. The following expresses concerns about simultaneous input and output as currently implemented in factorio. All well and good, but in effect that very concern is what motivates the most interesting part of your actual idea: a feature for designating input and output wire networks.]

I kinda want this as well, however, I think we have learned from inserters that there is potential for this sort of thing to be quite confusing. For example, does enabling both of these features simultaneously mean that by putting 10 items in the box, 10 items will now be requested? Since the 10 items are already in there, does this mean the request will be treated as fulfilled and therefore a noop? I'd guess, probably yes. But now what if we take out one item at tick "t"? At tick t+1 does this mean that we will be requesting 10 items and there are only nine in the box, hence one will be scheduled for delivery from logistics, if available? But now at tick t+2, we are requesting nine items, and nine are in the box, and one is scheduled for delivery. Imagine it is delivered super-promptly at tick t+3, now we are requesting nine, ten in the box, no new delivery scheduled; but, at tick t+4, I guess we are back to requesting 10 from logistics... this is probably not what the person setting the box up this way intended. Alternatively, is there some kind of magical "offset" applied to the circuit inputs to compensate for the boxes own "contents" output? Is that offset lagged by one tick to avoid discrepancies as described above? If there is some offset, does it apply to both circuit networks connected, or just to the chest "net", meaning that it will DWIM with one wire color connected but not both? What if we wire multiple chests together, do the offsets aggregate across the connected chests?

The same sort of muddle occurs when we put an inserter in "enable/disable" mode and "read hand contents" at the same time. For example, let's say enable/disable condition is set to ANY > 1, and read-hold mode is activated, and a red and green wire are connected which simply lead to a power pole with no other objects connected to those circuit networks. Now, at tick "t" the inserter is holding one iron plate: is the inserter disabled at tick "t"? Almost certainly not. But, how about ticks "t+1" or "t+2"? It starts to get quite hard to predict, in a vacuum, exactly what is going to happen here without explicit documentation or some sort of tricky in-game experimental observation. Once you figure out the quirks it's potentially quite powerful but until then, pretty damn confusing (then again, this is factorio: maybe confusing-but-powerful is OK).

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